


Hitting the Wall

by SylvanWitch



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: For the Generation Kill Spring Fest, M/M, Prompt Fic, please read the notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 08:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>For a strange, suspended moment Nate is in Baghdad and Boston.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hitting the Wall

**Author's Note:**

> For the _Generation Kill Spring Fest_ at the generation_kill LJ comm. For the prompt by noeon: "Anyone from First Recon at the Boston Marathon." 
> 
> Dedicated with respect and admiration to the Tough Ruck guys who ran it and who rescued victims of the bombing with their sweat still rolling down their backs.

Nate hits the wall at 20.8.  His calves are heavy, cramping, his breath coming up stale from his gut, and he fights the urge to puke up every ounce of pasta he pounded down the night before.

 

He wants to stop running, to prop his hands on his knees and drop his head, to let the sweat sluice off of his face.

 

He wants to close his eyes and let it all go, but in his head, he hears his father counseling him to dig deep and find what he needs. Hears him say, “You’ve got this, Nate.  I know you’ve got it.”

 

Cold mornings on the field at Loyola, sneakers heavy with dew, sweat plastering his jersey to his back, Nate would suck in gusting lungfuls that seared him down to his belly.  He’d heave and choke, spew thin yellow bile onto the white sideline, and shake it off to his father’s voice in his head, his coach’s voice a dim and distant second.

  
Nate’s father had never asked Nate for anything he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself.  It wasn’t the Corps that taught Nate that lesson, it was his dad:  Only ask of others what you’re willing to do yourself.

 

At 21.6 he shakes off the worst of the cramping, steps it up from a hobble to a jog, and hears the cheering crowd kick up the riot a notch.  The people along the route are a blur, reduced by salt tears and sweat to shifting colors and movements that jerk in time with his steps, but their words are clear. 

 

“You can do it!”  

 

“You’re doing great!”

 

“You’re a hero!”

 

He snorts sweat out of his nose and shakes his head to clear his eyes.

 

Ahead, someone steps into the street, arm outstretched, offering the lukewarm sports water that’s kept him going this far.  It’s neon green this time.

 

Along the route, the gutters have been painted in thin streams of unnatural blue, improbable red, impossible purple where other runners had given up the precious fluids.

 

Nate keeps his down and wipes his chin with the back of his hand, which comes back a sticky green.  For a second, he imagines he’s an alien bleeding out in the bright, warm light.

 

Then he’s focusing on his breathing again, marking the distance, hearing his recruiting officer calling the time as he tries to beat the clock and qualify for OCS.  

 

That first test, he hadn’t kept anything down.  The officer’s hand had been a steadying weight between his shoulder blades as he’d said, “We’ll get you there.  You’ll make it.”

 

And he had. Nate had pared himself down into a lean, powerful machine, his heart beating like a piston in perfect counterpoint to his speeding feet.  

 

There’s no speed left in him now, not even enough to work up a phantom breeze where his skin breaks the air, but he’s still moving, and he counts that a win.

 

At 25.3, Nate smiles.  It feels strange on his face, lopsided and odd, but he keeps it there, because for the first time he allows himself to remember what he’d tucked away all this time, reserving for the greatest need, the last mile, when the road feels like it’s sucking at his heels and the air has grown molten and thick in his throat:  Brad’s waiting at the finish line.

 

At 25.8 Nate starts to scan the hazy crowd ahead for a tall, unmistakable figure in washed-out fatigues and an old OCS shirt.  (He knows what Brad’s wearing because he watched him put it on at oh-dark-thirty, when Brad insisted on rising with him and sharing Nate’s pre-race routine.)

 

At 25.9 he tunes out the delighted crowds, the crowing joy of finishers’ families, to listen for a single bass line, a familiar “Boo-rah!”

 

At 26.0 Nate feels the weight of Brad’s steady gaze, knows he’s willing Nate forward for the last two-tenths.

 

At 26.1 he tastes victory on his tongue, seeing the finish line waver with fatigue and pavement heat.

 

At 26.2 something shivers over his skin and his smile strays with his footsteps, Brad’s hand on his shoulder steadying him, Brad saying, “Take it easy, I’ve got you.”

 

Then there’s more sports drink and a cool towel and a crowd of strangers wishing him well, and Nate’s coming back to the idea of standing still.  The world, he remembers, still rolls beneath his feet, but now it’s too slow to feel the movement.  He spreads his legs for balance and lets his knees go loose, huffs out a laugh and starts thanking people at random.

 

Brad leads him to the finishers’ tent, where they watch a guy with a body like a blade, a runner’s runner, record Nate’s time for posterity.

 

Nate’s grinning again.

 

The sensible thing now would be to go back to the hotel, of course, let Brad pamper him, put him in the bath, order him a plate of food the size of a Humvee. 

 

Except when Nate tells Brad about the guys he passed, the Tough Ruck crew in their forty-pound packs and fatigues who are marching the marathon double-time for all the men and women who didn’t make it back, he finds himself saying, “Let’s wait.”

 

They don’t have to stay.  There have been enough memorials between them to account for a rural cemetery’s-worth of dead young men.

 

But they can’t leave, either, and both of them know it, some joy draining from their eyes even as Brad straightens into parade rest and Nate’s smile takes on the shadows of his former self.

 

He’s learned that there’s no escaping the war.  There’s only giving it the room it needs and leaving himself space around it.

 

When the war comes to him, Nate’s half-turned toward Brad, gesturing toward the last of the Tough Ruck reservists, who’s high-fiving the ones in his crew that had already crossed the finish line.

 

At first, Nate has a stunned, attenuated second of misunderstanding, the incongruity of Boylston Street and a crowd of well-wishers and runners in bright Lycra against the sudden, inexorable destruction of the bomb.

 

Brad’s quicker, his memories more immediate, and Nate’s on the ground, face pressed against an oil spot on the asphalt before he can process that there’s been an explosion.

 

Then he’s pushing up against Brad’s weight, frantic that Brad’s been hit.

 

When Brad’s hand comes into view to help him upright, Nate lets out a held breath and they turn together toward the scene of the explosion, eyes already searching for the likely threats.

 

Brad at his six, Nate leads the way toward the smoke, where the screams are shrill even over the chirp of close sirens.

 

Someone staggers into view, race number smoldering, and with the flat of his broad hand, Brad stops the man, pats out the creeping flame, cups his shoulder and leads him toward a police officer who’s skidding to a stop just behind them.

 

The cop starts to say something, and Brad barks, “US Marines,” and they’re waved back toward the scene, where they see the reservists already wading in, tearing at a collapsed span of metal fencing that’s trapped people beneath it.

 

A wail goes up from a victim obscured entirely by the choking smog, and Nate covers his mouth with his arm and peers into the haze.

 

A woman is crying, frantic, words in an alien tongue.  

 

For a strange, suspended moment Nate is in Baghdad and Boston.  He can’t communicate in either of those places, and he feels the strangling fear and the terrible helplessness of not having enough of anything to give.

 

And then he hears his father say, “You’ve got this, Nate.  I know you’ve got it.” 

 

And beside him six thousand miles away and ten years ago, Brad is saying, “I trust you, sir.” 

 

And then the woman’s voice resolves into a mother crying, “Help my son!  Please, help my son!” which are words that Nate would know in any language.

 

He says, “Here!” in a voice of command, raising his hand to signal an EMT, and he and Brad pass into the obscuring smoke, holding their breath against the sting of it, and find themselves again on its other side, standing between the destroying fire and the people it would devour.

 

 _This time_ , Nate thinks, _it will be enough_.  

 

_This time it will be_

  
_This time…_


End file.
